“The children are not well; you don’t listen to them.” This is the distinctive reply that Eva gives a policeman who asks why she has just set fire to an entire sunflower field. A line which conveys, from the get-go, the anger and urgency at the heart of Emanuela Rossi’s sophomore feature film, and the conviction that the questions society would rather not answer might just be lurking behind a woman’s apparent madness.

After confining her characters within four walls in her previous film, Darkness, Eva (which world premiered in competition in the 43rd Torino Film Festival and is now screening at the Festival do Rio (Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival)) sees the director taking her camera outdoors into Umbria’s woods, lakes and fields, transforming nature into a dramaturgical presence. It’s an environment which seems unspoilt, but which shows all the signs of an ailing world: polluted waters, red algae, pesticides and TV images of environmental disasters.

Eva (Brazilian actress Carol Duarte, the protagonist of The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão and co-star of La Chimera) lives on the fringes of society with an apparent mission of seeking out children. She meets them in the most disparate of places (tourist sites, shopping malls, beaches), and all it takes is a shared look for a mysterious sense of trust to take hold. Who this woman really is, and what happens to the children after they meet her, remains shrouded in mystery for a long time, stoking thriller-like tension that gradually yields to a fantastical, almost metaphysical dimension.

However, her encounter with Nicola (Tommaso Zoppi), who’s the son of Giacomo (Edoardo Pesce), alters the course of her mission. The boy lives with his father in a remote farmhouse surrounded by bees, which Giacomo sees as sentinels of the environment: if the area is contaminated, they die or they flee. This is potentially the film’s clearest metaphor, since the bees embody a natural early-warning system which humans seem to have stopped heeding. Nicola bonds with Eva at once, recognising her as a maternal figure, while his father tries to protect him by creating a kind of safety bubble around him. But that small paradise is likewise bound to prove illusory.

Ultimately, Rossi fashions a hybrid film in which reality and hallucinations end up cross-contaminating. Sunflower fields turn blood-red, waters take on unsettling hues and natural elements seem endowed with a sensitivity all of their own. Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography transforms the landscape into an ambiguous presence which is sometimes welcoming, at others menacing, while Pasquale Catalano’s score speaks to its disquieting undertones. At the centre of all this stands the magnetic Carol Duarte, who lends Eva physical otherness as well as a sense of vulnerability. Her character oscillates between prophetess and alien creature, while Edoardo Pesce serves as her counterpoint: a loving father who is so intent on controlling any danger, he fails to see what’s actually happening.

Overall, the film starts out with an effective mystery, sketching out an enigmatic character in the form of Eva, and a mission whose contours the viewer gradually comes to know. But as the story advances, the symbolic and metaphysical elements accumulate, making the protagonist’s path increasingly hard to read. What emerges is a parable about our inability to see, yet in trying to hold together a thriller, an eco-allegory and a fantastical tale, the film ends up complicating its own narrative trajectory. Eva sees what others ignore and thus becomes a figure as salvific as she is unsettling. The question it leaves the viewer is simple and anything but reassuring: in a poisoned world, is there anywhere that’s still genuinely safe for children?

Eva was produced by Courier Film in co-production with Tarpini Production.